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Why 78 Percent Of SMBs Haven’t Adopted EMV

 Tick tock, tick tock, the Oct. 1 EMV deadline is almost here.

While the big box retailers are already equipped for the change, the real test will be how many small business make the switch. And if the new survey results from Software Advice, a reviews hub for POS systems, are any indication, the EMV small business battle has a long way to go before more SMBs are on board.

Its latest survey shows that only 22 percent of SMB retailers are actually prepared to meet the EMV deadline. The survey also shows that less than a fourth of small retailers are currently EMV-compliant and that 23 percent in the non-compliant group have said that EMV is “unnecessary.”

“Small businesses risk devastating consequences if they aren’t prepared. This is especially true if they are running on tight margins to begin with. Once the liability shift occurs, if the proprietor accepts a fraudulent charge via swipe, they will be held liable for that charge if the terminal is not EMV-compliant,” Mark Ranta, senior solution consultant for retail banking at ACI, told Forbes.

The survey showed that another 22 percent said they were moderately confident that they would meet the EMV deadline; 17 percent were minimally confident; 13 percent were extremely confident; 11 percent were very confident; 9 percent weren’t confident at all and 7 percent were unaware of the deadline. Of those who haven’t adopted EMV, 34 percent said they haven’t had time to research and implement the system, 33 percent said it’s too expensive and 10 percent said they don’t know about EMV.

“I think there has been a sense that [merchants] were just going to ignore this. They didn’t believe it was going to happen, or they just put it out of their mind because they had more important things to worry about,” Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, wrote in the report.

“Anybody [who is] saying ‘I have no intention of ever upgrading to EMV’ might change their tune a month later, once they get socked with a large chargeback that they’ve never seen before,” Vanderhoof continued.

On the other end of the EMV deadline issue is the fact that most consumers are reporting that they don’t have EMV cards. This particular study shows that nearly two-thirds of consumers haven’t been issued EMV cards. The survey results show that 62 percent of consumers don’t have the cards yet, 24 percent who have them have used them, and 14 percent said they have the cards but haven’t used them.

“The manufacturers who are supplying the cards to the U.S. financial institutions are all saying that at, or very close to, 50 percent of the total cards in the market will have EMV by the end of the year; about 600 million out of the 1.2 billion will be in market,” Vanderhoof said.

The survey results, however, point to a reason that shows why most single-store retailers aren’t EMV-compliant: They don’t have a POS system in place. That’s also another pain point those in the payments industry would argue needs to change.

GUYS!! OUR WORK IS CUT OUT FOR US!! GET OUT AND YAK YAK YAK!!

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 Richard Branson on Luck and Hard Work:

I remember watching the final round of the British Open golf championship on TV and seeing one of the leaders chip out of a deep greenside bunker. His shot was high but it just clipped the top of the flagpole and amazingly the ball dropped right into the hole. One of the British commentary team exclaimed, "Oh my goodness, what a lucky shot!"

Another commentator in the broadcast booth (a retired American champion as I recall) immediately snapped back with a stinging rebuke, "Lucky! What do you mean 'lucky'? Do you know how many thousands of hours we all spend practising shots like that? He was trying to put it in the hole and he succeeded. Let me tell you, he worked long and hard on getting that lucky!"

The same sentiment was more eloquently expressed once by Gary Player one of the all-time golf greats, who famously said, "The harder I practise, the luckier I get."

Over the years, like that golfer, I have often been accused of being lucky in business, but I too believe that a lot of very hard work has played a major part in any luck that has come my way. I must admit to sometimes struggling to figure out where coincidence stops and good luck begins, or put differently, how just happening to "be in the right place at the right time" can so dramatically play into one's path through life.

A LUCKY EXORCISM

One classic example of this phenomenon had a huge bearing on the early success of Virgin Records. To our surprise and delight, our first-ever album release, Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells," had become a huge hit in the U.K. but we were still trying to get someone to take it in the U.S.

Despite this European success and my persistent efforts, I just couldn't seem to convince the legendary head of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun, that an all-instrumental album would sell in North America. Regrettably he just didn't "get it."
Then one day while Ahmet just happened to be playing the album in his office ( trying to figure out what all the fuss was about) in walked movie director William Friedkin looking for backing music for a movie he had in the works.

By an amazing stroke of good fortune, before Ahmet could turn it off, Friedkin heard "Tubular Bells," instantly loved it and that was that: he had his backing track and we had our U.S. deal with Atlantic. Oh yes, and the movie he was working on just happened to be "The Exorcist," which was destined to become one of the greatest box-office hits of the day, and so it also helped introduce "Tubular Bells" to a global audience.

You could call it luck if you want, but there again I'd spent a lot of time yammering away at Ahmet and if he hadn't been intrigued enough to listen to it one more time it would  never have been playing at that critical moment in time.

Reprinted from "THE VIRGIN WAY: Everything I Know About Leadership" by Richard Branson with permission of Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright (c) Richard Branson, 2014.

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